Spherically Symmetric Gravitational Collapse

Sammanfattning: This thesis presents a derivation of the equation of motion of particles in a dust star, as it undergoes collapse. This is done by finding exact solutions to the Einstein field equations. We follow the original work by Oppenheimer and Snyder, starting from the general spherically symmetric metric in comoving coordinates. Further, a rederivation of the work by Chen, Adler, Bjorken and Liu shows that the same results can be obtained using the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric, with the curvature constant set to zero, and using Gullstrand-Painlev ́e coordinates. Finally, we extend this to the case of nonzero curvature constant, again using Gullstrand-Painlevé coordinates.